WGG's Thoughts on the Local Food Movement

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About 90% of WGG’s sales are to households with 1 or 2 people sitting down to partake in a meal. And even if that household orders some larger-ticket Items like meat, fish or cheese, that still translates into way too much Produce for that household to use without way too much waste. So, these households forego ordering. From the WGG perspective, I have to set Minimum Order requirements to make WGG a successful, sustainable operation. We are all aware of the Island “tithe”…Gas, hardware, food just cost more. My suppliers face this tithe, as well, and that fact is reflected in the pricing I pay for their goods. This is “Local Food for Local Folks”… WGG doesn’t have the option of buying wholesale from Charlie’s and marking it up 200% like the groceries. With my Cost of Goods, I just cannot drive all over the Island making $20-25 deliveries, fiscally.

So, how to put these smaller Orders that meet your needs together with the efficiencies WGG needs to be sustainable and prosper?

There are a couple locations already where 2 or 3 households each make their separate, smaller Orders and WGG delivers to the 1 “Drop Site” location. Each Order is packed separately into your cooler. Each household cuts WGG a separate check for their amount due…Each has a separate, unique account in WGG’s farmigo ordering system so there is no “who owes how much for what??” dilemmas.

So whether it is a neighbor(s), friends or relatives that come together as a Drop Site, WGG will deliver to that location weekly. I envision a neighborhood such as Admiral’s Cove or the Holmes Harbor Golf Course having a Drop Site…At the neighborhood level. More than likely, it’s going to take a while to build up to this. Presently, we have established Drop Sites in Coupeville, Freeland and Langley along with my place for those south of Deer Lake Rd.

If you would like to sponsor a Drop Site, please let me know so that I can match you to folks you do not know who are looking a location. Might make yourself a new friend! Other than a couple extra coolers in the driveway on delivery day, I do not foresee sponsoring a Drop Site as too much hassle.

The idea is to move Local Food from local farms and artisan producers into your kitchen in a timely and efficient (both yours & mine) manner. As always, my suppliers & I Thank You for spending your food dollars with us!

Big conflab the next couple of days in Clinton concerning local food on this Island. May be use it as a means to revitalize Clinton. Cool…Why do they do these things in May when folks that ACTUALLY do what they are yakking about are up to their eyeballs in work?? Bunch of folks getting together to “map the food resources we have and dream about what could be” to quote their ad on Drewslist. Food resources on Whidbey Island…Think the WGG vendor email list has that one pretty well covered. My dream?? I started it 9 years ago, it’s called Whidbey Green Goods…

Rather than run a bunch of employees & sit on a little fiefdom, I decided to form a “web” of the little growers/producers on this Island and the surrounding counties. WGG gives them a distinct marketing outlet over and above their current outlets. It is a Pick-to-Order system so there is very little waste like a farmers market. It is delivered so there is 2.3 times less fuel used to “move the food” than the standard CSA model of come & fetch. With aggregation, folks get a far wider selection, similar to a farmers market, but do not have to contend with the weather or “finding” time to go marketing. From farm-to-doorstep, food is stored for utmost freshness and on the doorstep within a couple days of the pick.

Guess the question I have for the CLEO meet, why not support the local food system that is already in place? I’m about 100% certain if you asked any grower/artisan producer, myself included, what they need, their answer would be MORE SALES. They may not express that thought to the general populace, but that is what I hear down in the trenches. And contrary to popular opinion, Whidbey Telecom and the likes do not take ‘kudos’ as payment-in-full.

If the CLEO meet wants something to ponder, how does local food attract the next tier of the BUYING public?? This is a question being asked nationally, as well…

While most of the article deals with the trail & tribulations of a singular producer, many of the insights make absolutely perfect sense for the obstacles facing the “Local Food” movement. Below are quoted segments that I found relevant…

“Pete is one of countless small food producers in America who have found the cost of doing business–mainly the cost of infrastructure–to be prohibitive, one of the reasons why the local food movement has hit a wall. Whether it is the stringent requirements for slaughtering and processing meats, the cost of building a production or storage facility, the learning curve regarding food-safety regulations, or the dearth of distribution options, many small-scale food artisans find it discouragingly di;cult to grow beyond the booth at the farmers’ market. And they are finding those farmers’ markets less useful. Although the number of markets in the United States has exploded from 1,744 in 1994 to 4,000 in 2005 and 7,864 in 2012, sales have not kept pace; more and more farmers are trying to slice the same pie.

“Farmers’ markets aren’t sexy anymore,” is how Jean Hamilton, the longtime market development coordinator for the Vermont chapter of the National Organic Farmers Association (NOFA), puts it. “The problem is that we were really good at launching farmers’ markets, and we launched a whole bunch of them, and we gave them just enough rope to hang themselves. So now there’s all these farmers’ markets that have really low capacity.”

Joe Buley agrees. A burned-out chef turned farmer, Joe holds down the booth across from Pete Colman at the Montpelier farmers’ market, selling eggs, tomatoes, and the sweetest spinach I’ve ever tasted. “The traditional markets are not working anymore,” he told me. “They’re oversaturated. It used to be that the Montpelier market was all there was. Now there’s a Barre market, there’s a Northfield market, there’s a Middlesex market. Even New York City used to just have the one main Greenmarket. Now markets have popped up all over the city. It’s diluting the dollars. It takes two full-time employees all day on Friday to prep and pack out everything for the market, and then there’s two of us there all day on Saturday. To leave with three hundred dollars? That’s going backwards.”

Farmers’ markets account for less than 1% of food sales in the United States. They are the window dressing. If the sustainable food movement is to become a true movement with any measurable impact on the way America feeds itself, it must find a way to reach beyond the early adopters. It must make it much easier for local producers and consumers to find each other. It must restore the regional infrastructure that withered with the rise of the national distributors, who have little interest in working with local operations. What we need is a system of local “food hubs” that can process and bundle local foods and deliver them to the places where America eats.

This is not exactly a revelation. The same conclusion has been reached by the USDA, by sustainable food advocates, and by the foundations that fund their efforts. Together, they have transformed the local-food scene in the United States. Working for NOFA, Jean Hamilton had a front-row seat. “Our movement shifted all at once. Five years ago, all the funders said, ‘We’re funding infrastructure.'”

“One reason the middle infrastructure of the sustainable food movement has lagged behind the rest of the movement is that romance doesn’t scale. A farm is lovely; a warehouse is not. A single artisanal salami is sexy, but the only person who gets really excited about a thousand artisanal salamis hanging in a stainless-steel walk-in is the health inspector who doesn’t have to visit the client in his moldering barn anymore.”

“Almost all food hubs that meet the dictionary definition are not profitable,” says Amanda Oborne, who directs the conservation organization Ecotrust’s FoodHub, an online dating service for wholesale food buyers and sellers. How could they be? They are competing in one of the world’s most cutthroat businesses, which often operates on net margins of less than 1%, and they are trying to return more money to the farmers, operate on smaller scales, and provide additional social and environmental services. Cutting out the middleman to get more of the customer’s money into the hands of the farmer may sound great in a TED talk, but the reality is that there is no way to challenge the economies of scale of industrial food production, which is propped up by subsidies, kickbacks, and money-saving environmental shortcuts.

“In fact, Robin purposely founded the Mad River Food Hub as a for-profit enterprise. “One of our core values was that we would not take any public funds for operations. If you have grants coming in, then your organization is sustainable only as long as the grants are coming in. We live and die on our own. There’s no one here to save us. The only way we can bring money into the organization is by adding to the success of companies using the food hub.”

“Perhaps most importantly, it helps local food reach beyond what you might call the low-hanging fruitcakes–those of us who will drive miles out of our way just for the privilege of living on local turnips all winter. “I’m accessing this whole new demographic. Ninety percent of my CSA customers have never belonged to a CSA before. These are people who are just not gonna buy a share and come out to the farm every Thursday night. They want to support farmers, they want to eat locally, but they don’t have the time. But if I can drop it off on their doorstep, they sign right up.”

Article was written by Rowan Jacobsen…

Many of the founding principles & tenets of Whidbey Green Goods follow the same lines of deduction quoted above. 1) Farmers Markets capture only a small percentage of a given population. 2) Aggregation & distribution ain’t sexy, but for Local Food to move forward, they are integral. 3) They have to be fiscally sustainable. 4) People are busy…The convenience of home delivery is a major selling point.